Yes And

“You are becoming an Enneagram 7 in your second half of life,” my husband says with a knowing smile after I share my plans to apply for tickets to be in the studio audience of Saturday Night Live.

As an Enneagram 2, I have spent hours during my first half of life reading people’s microexpressions and intuiting their unspoken needs. I’ve mastered the subtle art of exiting my own body and inhabiting another person. At times, I seemed to understand their inner landscape better than my own. I am grateful for this honed ability as it was a survival skill in my family of origin and has kept me safe from the fear of my own inner world of pain, unmet longings, and pleasure.

Through my own work of therapy over the last two decades, I have embarked on the precarious journey of exploring my inner world and getting to know myself for who I am rather than for how I bend and please others.

In the last few years, I’ve noticed something new emerging: a deep desire for sensations, stimulation, and beauty. I’ve had a longing to stay in my body and simultaneously engage with people around me in the realm of play. This brought me to eagerly suggest taking an improv class to a few of my close friends while we marveled at the freedom we saw in the players at our local club. They agreed, and we started our first class a few days later.

On the first night, our instructor proceeded to introduce us to a series of improv games involving movement and creating collaborative stories. I felt like a giddy little girl when we played one of my favorite games of all time, Big Booty. He gave us a rule as we engaged in the games. “If you mess up or blank out, throw up your hands, and we are all going to clap for you.” This allowed me the freedom to play without fear that I had to get it right.

We championed each other in taking risks, creating safety, and collectively trusting our bodies.

Throughout the improv class, someone would start a scene with a particular prompt, and he would encourage us to walk into the scene even if we didn’t know what we were going to say. “Trust your body and say whatever comes to mind.” It was hard to get out of my head and over my fear of making a mistake. Paradoxically, we found the more we tried, the less funny we were, and the more bizarre or even ordinary things that we blurted out were hilarious.

One of my favorite games we played was called Blind Freeze tag. One person starts a scene, and the facilitator says “freeze” amidst the action. At that point, someone else tags in, starting a new scene as they take on the exact body position of one of the people who already had been in the scene. One night I took over someone who had been milking a cow and began a scene where I was delivering a baby at home and the other player was my midwife. It was both exhilarating and vulnerable to trust my body.

Improv has a “yes and” philosophy. This means that however someone starts a scene, you say “yes” to the moment by showing gratitude for their offering and then adding to it. This was such a beautiful philosophy that created a synchronicity with people where I got to be myself while also allowing my cast mates to be themselves. My body felt safe and connected knowing that this magical combination only works if I stay in my body and they stay in theirs. Together, we were creating something new and unplanned, often surprising ourselves by where we went with a scene.

We had a showcase at the end of the class for our friends and family. My middle daughter Norah was in the front row, and I could hear her giggles at one of the lines I spontaneously delivered. I felt delight course through my body. Somehow my embodiment was allowing her to be free in her body, something the little girl in me rarely felt the freedom to do amidst scanning my environment for safety. As Hannah Coulter puts it in Wendell Berry’s novel, “You have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.”

The art of improvisation invited me to embodiment and play, to living fully in the present. It invited my Enneagram 2 home to myself instead of anxiously embodying someone else—a priceless and deeply satisfying gift.

---

Rachel Blackston loves all things beautiful…rich conversations over a hot cup of lemon ginger tea, watching her three little girls twirl around in tutus, and Florida sunrises on her morning walks. She resides in Orlando with her lanky, marathon-running husband and her precious daughters, priceless gifts after several years of infertility. Rachel and her husband Michael co-founded Redeemer Counseling. As a therapist, Rachel considers it an honor to walk with women in their stories of harm, beauty, and redemption.